Much content which has traditionally been shared through printing and distribution, for example text, drawings, photographs, charts, etc., is today being made available in electronic format in the form of what is typically referred to as electronic books, or e-books. In fact, today's learning environment generally offers three types of content in most educational courses: traditional textbooks produced by publishers, customized content developed by professors and content developed and/or found by the students. The traditional “static,” or printed paper textbooks generally contribute about 30-40% of the content of a course and serve to provide material containing the core concepts and principles of the course. Customized content developed by professors (such as syllabuses, projects, assignments and discussion reviews) accounts for about another 30% of course content. Finally, the “interactive and spontaneous content” found or developed by the students (such as content created by individuals and teams for projects and other assignments), accounts for the remaining 20-30%. This student-sourced content may, for example, be content generated through working out solutions to problems/cases or completion of assignments. Such student-sourced content is generally stimulating and is believed to generate a lasting, more-permanent knowledge growth within individual students than is third-party content. The present inventors believe that student-sourced or user-sourced content can be leveraged to improve the two other types of content generation.
Professors and students, however, are constantly struggling to successfully integrate and customize all three content types into a single dynamic learning content workflow platform/solution that would adapt to each users' (e.g. students) unique individual knowledge base, learning process, learning pace and learning format (such as reading text, listening to audio or video).
Current offerings from textbook publishers are mainly book-based and static. This forces students to source chapter-based, dynamic, supplementary content of their own accord. In contrast to the static materials, teaching in universities and schools, is chapter-based and not book-based. Unlike the “older days” where students just read printed textbooks, students today are used to finding information and doing homework online and they want to integrate their findings into their course materials. A key problem recognized by professors teaching with current textbooks is that such textbooks are very static, in comparison to teaching and student work, which is very much dynamic. Recent advances or findings cannot quickly be incorporated in a revision cycle of standard printed textbooks that typically spans several years.
Moreover, the combination of printed textbook, professor-contributed and student-sourced offerings have very limited combining and sharing possibilities. Professors and students are having a hard time sharing their own developed or sourced content on secure and convenient platforms.
Professors and students often use real-time communication functionalities such as AOL Messenger®, Yahoo Messenger®, Skype® etc. for formal, and sometimes informal communications. These existing communication channels, however, are of limited use in enhancing extrinsic study materials.
Several companies have addressed the challenge of enabling users to interact with the electronic content. Two companies in this field are Ebrary™ and SafariU™.
Considering first Ebrary™, the company is an e-book technology and services company dedicated to serving the library and publishing community. Funded by Random House Ventures LLC, Pearson plc and The McGraw-Hill Companies, Ebrary™ included content provided by more than 180 publishers. It offers to its customers full text, digital books and other authoritative content. Ebrary™ products are delivered via a proprietary dynamic content platform. To access the content, users need to download a special Ebrary™ reader for reading, viewing and taking notes. The Ebrary™ system provides an InfoTools™ function to support contextual linking. However, the features have been developed for the benefit of publishers and libraries; and not for end-users such as professors and students. Ebrary™ only has a few dynamic, interactive features and it stops short of offering the features believed by the present inventors to be required to solve the problems described above.
SafariU™, which was developed by O'Reilly Media, is an XML-driven web-based platform which enables professors to build customized print books and online syllabi, while creating an environment for the exchange of teaching materials. While SafariU™ is considered by many to be a forward-thinking solution in the area of dynamic electronic content, as it incorporates some of the key needs of professors, it still has some serious drawbacks. These problems arise from the fundamental concern of the present inventors that the platform is not end-user driven. SafariU™ is not believed to offer any real-time communication and appears to miss the importance of in-classroom discussions between professors and students. The content platform is, to the best knowledge of the present inventors, not dynamic and not customizable for students. Once professors create content, students have no option of or tools for adapting it to their specific needs. Finally, the web interface is believed by the present inventors to be awkward and difficult to understand.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,988,138 to Alcorn et al. shows an Internet-based education support system and method, whereby elements of an electronic school and classroom are provided online, including the provision of electronic textbooks. The invention appears to lack any significant functionality around the use of content materials. U.S. published patent application 20060095502 to Lewis et al. shows systems and methods for sharing content and facilitating real-time communications between parties using the content. As with the Alcorn et al. reference, the present inventors believe that the Lewis et al. reference falls short of providing the functionality necessary to enable users to fully realize an interactive, community experience relating to shared content.
The present inventors have determined that what is needed is a solution that informs all users of the specific section locations of any person reading the available content in the same class or user group, in combination with tools that make interactive mark-up and communications within text content possible for the first time. The present inventors have thus recognized a need in the art to facilitate the sharing, study and commentary of electronically published materials in a consistent and repeatable user-friendly manner.